We're not at all sure that many birders appreciate quite how uncommon adults of the vast majority of the routine migrants are at migration watchpoints like Portland: put simply, adults are much too clever/experienced to make the mistake of stopping off in the suboptimal habitat of a godforsaken, barren and windswept headland like ours; without a lot of checking back we can't quantify the precise ratio of adults vs first year Redstarts in autumn but the adult male featured above was the first one we can remember handling for several years. The most obvious pitfall with adults is assuming - wrongly - that the brown tips to the greater and median coverts are an immature feature; these feathers, at least when fresh, are always to some degree brown-tipped, and it's the basal edges of the greater coverts that should be checked - grey in adults, brown in first years. Our first year bird also shows a very typical moult-contrast in the greater coverts: the outer 8 or 9 feathers are juvenile, whereas the innermost 1 or 2 with an adult-type pattern have been replaced prior to migration during the post-juvenile moult. The difference in tail shape between the two age classes (typically, adults have broader, more rounded-tipped feathers than first years) is maybe not so obvious in Redstart as it is in many of our regular migrants, but the two tails above do show rather nicely the much better quality of the adult feathers when compared with the poorer quality - already very worn and chipped at this early stage of migration - of those of the first year.